Photo: Delray Beach Police Department
In November 1983, Carla Lowe waited for the train at the Amtrak station in Delray Beach, Fla.
The 21-year-old from Pompano Beach never boarded the train.
On Nov. 13, 1983, her lifeless body was found in the middle of Depot Avenue, near the station,The Palm Beach Postreports. She had been brutally beaten and run over.
For years the case went cold, until now.
On Nov. 29, nearly 40 years after Lowe’s murder, police arrested Ralph Williams, 59, in Jacksonville, Delray Beach Police Chief Javaro Sims said at a press conference.
The arrest came after a grand jury in Palm Beach determined there was enough evidence to indict him, Sims said.
A Sheriff’s Department SWAT team located Williams in Jacksonville. He is charged with first-degree murder with a weapon, Sims said.
Police have not identified a motive for the slaying, though some of the victim’s belongings were taken, Detective Todd Clancy said.
The arrest was the first since the creation of a new cold case division within the department in January of this year, authorities said.
Ralph Williams.Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office
When Clancy began looking into Lowe’s decades-old murder, he began reaching out to retired homicide detectives who had investigated these cases years before, Clancy said.
Then, he added, “With recent advances in technology, we were able to obtain fingerprints from a piece of evidence left at the scene,” he said.
Detectives worked with the UK-based Foster and Freeman Company, “which has a new machine out there that is able to get a new fingerprint,” Clancy said.
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The company’s “recovery machine” allowed detectives to “retrieve a fingerprint” that investigators were unable to identify “in traditional ways,” Clancy said.
Williams remains held in jail while awaiting extradition to Palm Beach County.
No attorney is listed for him in online court records.
In the meantime, Lowe’s family continues to mourn her loss.
“I just want the world to know Carla was a good person,” her sister, Jackie Lowe-Repass said in a statement she released through the police department, thePalm Beach Postreports. “She was a beautiful and giving person. She wasn’t just a piece of trash that someone threw away.”
In the statement, she said she dreamed of the day that her sister’s killer would be brought to justice.
“I played this in my head a thousand times. I never thought this day would come. There’s a name now to who did this to my sister.”
source: people.com
